A Book of Death and Fish (9 page)

My journey to the east started on the wall outside the Renden. OK, why did the meeting not happen in the Rendezvous Café? Because I was banned from there at the time. And we couldn’t go to the Lido because there was no way Kenny F was going to get in. He got very protective if people had a go at us for our hair or anything. Like in
Easy Rider.
He wasn’t really aggressive, just looked a bit threatening when he stuck out his big fisherman’s chest. Then it could all escalate.

So this guy comes up when we’ve got our arses parked on the wall and says, ‘What is there to do in this lousy town of yours?’

I liked him already.

‘You’re seeing it, cove. What brings you here?’

He was a member of the Bahá’í Faith. Couldn’t place his voice, his looks, short, tight curly hair. Egyptian, he says, but he was living in Reading now.

He was surprised I knew the name of an English town. Alcocks of Reading, fishing tackle manufacturer, of course. Later to become Norris-Shakespeare, with a noticeable drop in average quality.

He nodded. I was sure of a lot of things then. I was wrong about Reading, though. Alcocks manufactured in Redditch. A different town.

‘So what do you guys believe in then, apart from fishing?’ We told him that one day, on this island, there’d be a group of crofts and at the middle there’d be a big barn and every waif and stray and passer-by could just crash there and that would become a known thing.

The dudes doing the talking are of course the same dudes whose Da’s couldn’t get them to dig the garden. We did go fishing though. So we’d do just enough digging to get a tobacco tin full of worms.

We’d talk about anything. Sitting on the wall. All weathers. Religion was worth half an hour.

He told us his beliefs. The essential one-ness of all the major world religions. It’s just the hair-splitting and dogmas that create confusion.

Sounds appealing doesn’t it, put like that.

So our gang ended up going to what they called ‘Firesides’, next door to the new auction mart. The word might sound a bit weird but it’s just imported American-speak for ceilidh. A wee gathering. The mart used to be on Westview Terrace. I could talk as fast as the auctioneer and swear with full grammar before I went to school. Life-skills. The sheep-pens still smelled much the same but the slaughterhouse was a bit of distance from most of the houses, now.

You’d know he was Egyptian when he got a shot of a car. With an SY influence – something in the way you take both hands off the wheel, hit the horn and flash the lights when you clock a mate. His sidekick was doing a PhD on the sugar flow of plants, concentrating on hogweed. You found specimens in abandoned yards in cities. Another guy with hair like ours was from Glasgow. He built chopper motorbikes.

‘Aye, sure, man, like in
Easy Rider.
Aye the Faith got me aff the drugs an tha.’ We were in the house of an NZ/Iranian couple. And the Iranian cove’s mother lived with them. She couldn’t speak English but one night her son said his mother would like to cook for us.

We were trying to cool it on the drink and one by one we would repeat the mantra, no chemicals man. So we just drifted by there, most nights. We were all about seventeen years of age.

So how did these religions fit together then? They seemed pretty different.

That was because prophets or Manifestations of God brought the same message, renewed from age to age but adapted to the needs of the time. So the law of Moses was a harsh one for a desert tribe. Jesus spoke to the individual and Muhammad built nationhood. Laws for society. The message of Bahá’u’lláh was for a new world order.

The new message was that science and religion should go hand in hand. Other principles were the equality of men and women and co-operation of all nations in a world commonwealth.

Sounded like pretty radical guys for nineteenth-century Iran.

I couldn’t see it then but it’s pretty clear now, it’s all about stories. I’d been fed stories with my milk and then with tea and three sugars. The river of Jordan had flowed into Westview Terrace and the waters of the Red Sea parted when you got clear of the lighthouse at Arnish. Catechism wasn’t so good. Remember, it was a big surprise to find that Manscheefend was three different words. Some of the phrases stuck with you, just the same.

There were a couple of nutcase teachers who had you learning chunks and chunks of psalms. This was mid-primary – before the shift to the Central Belt. You just couldn’t keep them all the lines in your head so you had to work out which verse you were going to get, plus one or two either side in case someone mucked it up and she’d stomp on to the next seat. An insurance policy really but it was good practice for arithmetic.

And it was worth the time to learn these few verses. Otherwise you’d probably get belted. Of course the idea of a scented woman in crisp clothes swinging a slim, split thong of top grade saddlery from over her shoulder – that does things to the Scottish male psyche. Did I mention this before? Don’t get carried away. I can tell you, ladies and gentlemen, there was nothing erotic about getting the strap in P5. Very specialised stuff.

Bri-Nylon outfits and hairs on her chin. A straggly moustache and slavers running from her mouth when she got worked up about something. A roar in the back of the throat which changed to a smiling softer tone when the headmaster took a look in to make sure there were no serious casualties. She had this habit of throwing the wooden-backed duster. So you had to get good at putting the lid of your desk up in time, as a shield. There was a cloud of chalk in the air. Then it was more psalms. It was good for developing your reflexes. Mine are still pretty good. So it was all education of a kind.

They couldn’t get rid of her so they made sure you got a good teacher before and after. The good ones – and I think all the others were good ones – they told stories half the time. New and Old Testament and Pinocchio on a Friday afa. Do you say that in other places? Our word for post-noon.

Staffs pointed at rocks, causing them to open and release sweet running water. Bushes burned but never fell to ashes. Loaves and fishes were shared between thousands. Two fishes to be precise. Now speaking as a guy who
wasn’t that keen on the salt herring, I could still appreciate the fact that they did look like they’d come from the Bible. They lay in their brine by a new batch of crusted loaves (more than five) at the cornershop. And I’d long borne witness to the debates as to whether my father or the sister should get the last one after half a dozen each had been scoffed. I was well placed to understand that satisfying a multitude with a couple of them was pretty good going.

The new stories, down by the new auction mart, took us into Iran. Only it was called Persia then. It was near the middle of the nineteenth century. A change was coming. There was a figure, a bit like John the Baptist, who paved the way. He was called the Báb, which meant that he was the gateway to the new religion. But the Bábí Faith was seen as a breakaway from Islam rather than a new religion. So the Mullahs went all out to stamp it out. Devotees were publicly tortured before execution. Reports of European observers include descriptions of people shod like horses and driven through the streets. The leader, a merchant from Tabriz, was shot in a barrack-square. He was suspended from a fastening to a wall, along with a disciple. When the dust cleared he was not to be seen. He was found in a nearby room, continuing the dictation of a last letter. He then said something like, ‘This task is completed, you can do your business now.’

So the story goes.

I was ready to give up on drink and drugs. I wanted to believe. I read the main account,
Nabíl’s Narrative
, in a fine edition, bound in dark green, embossed in gold leaf. Edited by the Guardian of the Faith who honed his grasp of rhetorical English at Balliol College, Oxford.

I’m not seventeen now. I’ve been back to that book. The translator and editor’s main stylistic influence, he said, was Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall
. There could be a whiff of Sir Winston in there too. The editor’s notes and footnotes add observations of Western commentators in English and in French but, with the exception of an account by the doctor who examined the leader, after he was beaten with the bastinado, these are not first-hand accounts.

Nabíl’s own account was gathered, many years after the events, while sharing the exile of one Mírzá Husayn-‘Alí, who claimed to be that next
Prophet or Manifestation of God. In that respect, his narrative is similar to the way that the events surrounding a carpenter’s son, from Nazareth, became fixed texts. Nabíl is a very fine storyteller. Author and editor list their sources. The genealogy of stories.

No disrespect to
Nabíl’s Narrative
but the best stories came from our mentor’s mother. She cooked us chicken, marinated in crushed walnuts and pomegranate puree. This is a day’s work, in preparations. I ate slowly to taste every mouthful. By this time I wasn’t smoking or drinking alcohol. Yes, I quit on the drink when I was seventeen. Food was always important but it became like a religious observance.

I don’t think it was just that chicken dish. It was the drama of the stories and there were a few warning signs in our own latter days. Waking up covered in puke again. The deaths of Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison.

One of our number had already met his death, like the Stones guitarist, in an outdoor pool, at a party, far from home. Some mates were becoming Jesus-freaks and others were talking about Guru Maharaji. Some of us were just inquisitive but the real devotees were the storytellers. Or maybe their conviction is what gave them the power to yarn for Scotland. Our local radical Christians didn’t have long hair. Well, maybe the women did but you couldn’t see that. It would usually be tied up in a bun or in a hat. (There will now follow a short digression on the subject of hat shops. Omit the next paragraph if you cannot see the relevance of this indicator.)

If you wish to appreciate the cultural forces at work in the Long Island it is important to observe and appreciate the central role of hat shops. In a fragile economy, then based mainly on the world fashion industry’s taste for Harris Tweed and the international restaurant trade’s appetite for prawns, SY could boast not one but two specialist retailers of hats. If it were not for this data, an observer would be tempted to conclude that hats worn by the religious community would all be in the style of sober head coverings, essential for modesty. More systematic sampling, without prejudice, will produce the following results:

Wide brims and narrow;

Red as well as blue or black

Yellow, less common but noticeably present in the congregations and not only at Easter – not a major Festival, anyway, in Long Island religious observation.

Then there are the additions:

Lace trim – completely acceptable;

Feathers – mandatory.

And that’s only the menswear.

But whether we were still religious believers or no, we were also doing the ‘Stop The War’ chant with Country Joe. I would sign up for any band called ‘The Fish’ anyway. It just couldn’t go on, this missile against missile balance of international power, not for much longer. Took a lot of arguing that one, with people who remembered being caught out, ill-prepared for the blitzkrieg of ’39. My olman for one. In an alliance with his brother-in-law fae The Broch.

It already seemed like another mythology, talking about my generation. I was born in 1955. Ten Years After – the name of a rock and roll band with a very fast guitarist by the name of Alvin Lee. Ten years after VE day, prisoners were still awaiting repatriation. Or exhumation.

I read the Qu’ran in translation. I couldn’t tie in all the loose ends. We’d sit up talking till after closing time. Keeping us out of temptation.

‘What about the Hindu religion?’

‘Well, that was so far back in history and there was so little written material that traditions developed. That’s why it’s now impossible to reconcile all the details.’

‘The Buddhists – these guys don’t really have a god, never mind heaven and hell?’

‘Cultural layers are so dense that it’s impossible to know what the original message was. But you can still see the influence of the Buddha’s positive energy. That’s why there’s a need for a new Manifestation of God from age to age.’

‘So another guy could appear tomorrow?’

‘In theory yes, just that Bahá’u’lláh specifically wrote that his message would be valid for a full thousand years.’

Now I can see how that’s a time period with a ring to it. We should do a study of architecture designed to last for a full thousand years. Albert Speer would be to the fore and maybe Nicolae Ceausescu’s favoured few would sneak in to be in that number. What’s with all the columns and domes?

I thought there would be a bit of resistance to this mystical period, from the olman and the olaid. Not so. They’d observed everything I was doing, the drugs and all and just held back. My olman could sense a tide turning and this was it. The direction was right, even if he couldn’t get his head round the details. As long as we were talking shit we weren’t smoking too much of it.

My olaid was almost envious when I said there was a new wind blowing, enough to stop the war in Vietnam. ‘Do you not have doubts?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I know we’re all part of something though we can’t agree on the details.’

‘I envy you,’ she said.

I was amazed to hear that my Brocher olaid had underlying doubts. She’d been brought up to full churches of fishermen in genseys, while hail blasted outside. There were even trumpets and other brass.

I got doubts later but I suppressed them. The food helped. Let me run by a few highlights. The food, not the doubts.

A Basque dish where the singed and peeled red peppers are marinated in walnut oil and cayenne. That was when my SYtalian mate brought me along to the wee Roman Catholic Church. We were invited across for tapas after the Mass which was a wee bit ornate for my taste. See, the Presbyterian vibe stays ringing in your ears, after all.